


An Absolute Clarity

by williamshooketh



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse
Genre: Boot Worship, Cunnilingus, F/M, Femdom, Grief/Mourning, Hallucinations, Hate Sex, Humiliation, Mommy Issues, Obsessive Behavior, Or Is It?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 08:57:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17701355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/williamshooketh/pseuds/williamshooketh
Summary: While attempting to contact his father in the wake of Mead's death, Michael has a different kind of vision and is forced to confront his feelings about Cordelia.





	An Absolute Clarity

**Author's Note:**

> Like the four other people and the shoelace currently sailing this tiny ship, I too watched Sojourn and had bad thoughts. Here ya go.

 

>  And he took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written,
> 
> “‘He will command his angels concerning you,
> 
> to guard you,’
> 
> and
> 
> “‘On their hands they will bear you up,
> 
> lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”
> 
> And Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.
> 
> Luke 4:9-13.

 

He saw her before he heard her: two polished boots, the hem of a black cloak dragging through the dead leaves on the ground. Cordelia, standing a couple yards away between a few trees. She did nothing more than watch him continue to kneel in his circle, but her mere presence made his hackles rise. He’d spent nearly five days kneeling in the center of the circle and while the ache in his knees had finally faded, the stab of hunger had only worsened until, to his frustration, it was all he could concentrate on. Heretically, he was beginning to wonder how much longer it would take for his father to put in an appearance, if he planned to at all.

Seeing the old bitch again was the last thing he wanted.

She was just the same as the last time they’d spoken: hair smooth and tumbling around the black lace of her frock. Utterly untouched.

“How did you find me?” His voice cracked from disuse. It hurt to work his tongue.

She glided forward until she stood just outside the circle, the pointed toes of her boots neatly positioned on the rim.

“You’re not as clever as you seem to think,” she said. A breeze sent dead leaves wheeling from the trees and stirred her hair. Michael swayed where he knelt on the ground. He didn’t like having to look up at her, but he was too weak to stand, and the last thing he wanted was to attempt it, only to collapse back at her feet again.

He stayed where he was on the ground and tried not to mind it.

 “Are you real?” he asked.

Her mouth curved into one of those smiles that made his fists curl: guarded, a little cool, but encouraging. He redirected his gaze to the ground. “What do you think?” she asked.

He scraped up a clod of earth and tossed it at her. Neatly, she sidestepped it and frowned. “That’s not very nice.”

“Are you going to try and make me leave the circle?”

“No.” Her tone was so mild that he was compelled to look back up at her. “I want you to let me into it.”

“Why would I ever do that?”

“Because you’re angry,” she said. “I imagine you’d like to take it out on me.” He pressed his lips together and didn’t reply. “I had your Miss Mead killed, after all.”

“Don’t talk about her.” He hated the tears that pricked at his eyes, hated the vulnerability they betrayed. He gritted his teeth together. “You don’t get to talk about her.”

He had cast the circle with the intent on speaking to his father but, like a dog searching for its absent master, his mind kept returning to Miss Mead: to the waffles she’d make him; the video game nights; her gentle ribbing when he came home late, waiting up for him with some old movie running and his dinner wrapped in tin foil in the refrigerator; her fierce protectiveness. “You put another hand on my son and I’ll cut it off,” she’d told the man who’d tried to feel him up at a gas station once. Michael had still been young enough to be uncomfortable with the peculiar effect he had on people, and at that moment—frozen, furious, unsure how to respond—he’d never loved Miss Mead more. He’d all but forgotten the incident. 

“You don’t,” he repeated, voice ragged, “get to talk about her.”

“I won’t,” Cordelia said. “But I won’t apologize either.” He stared up at her, chest aching. “You’re angry. You’re afraid. I can work with you like this.”

He shook his head slightly. “You’re not real. You’re just in my head, like the fucking angels.”

She held out one hand: smooth, elegant, beringed. “Sweet boy,” she said. She said it like she wanted the words to cut him. He stared at her hand. Part of him desperately wanted to take it, if only because he knew that if he did, someone else would start making the decisions again, and the burden of responsibility would no longer be his. His own hands twitched. He laid them on his thighs.

“If I’m in your head,” she said, “then there’s no harm in letting me in.”

“Yes, there is,” he said. “I can’t give in to you. Not here. Not anywhere.”

Still she refused to retract her hand.

He wanted to run away. He wanted to take her hand. He wanted to put her fingers in his mouth. They looked soft. He thought he could smell vanilla on them.

A sob broke through his throat. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. He stared resolutely at the ground so he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes in his shame.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, you do.”

Slowly, still refusing to make eye contact, he reached up. His hand wrapped around her thin wrist. Somehow, he could _feel_ her smile. He yanked her forward and didn’t try to hide his satisfaction when she stumbled into the circle.

He stared up at her. She was lovely—all that honey-colored hair, those unreadable eyes. He wanted to be her. He wanted her.

“Sweet boy,” she repeated.

He let go of her wrist and simply looked up at her, trying to read what she wanted in her face, but it was like looking in a mirror: he couldn’t see anything that he wasn’t already aware of. How he wished he could know the real Cordelia half as well. If only he were a part of her coven and could live alongside her: knowing the color of her every mood, knowing that her bedroom was only so far away and that, if he dared, he could kneel in front of her and put himself at her mercy. Kiss her boots and then drag himself further up.

Before he could second guess himself, he wrapped one hand around her left ankle, the other around her calf, and lifted her foot into the air to kiss the pointed toe of her boot. His tongue was dry from four days of fasting, and so the sensation was hardly comfortable, but still, something kindled in him that he couldn’t quite define. Halfway between desire and utter detestation. The leather tasted earthy, smooth under his tongue as he licked a long stripe up to the top.

Cordelia’s hands tangled in his hair and pulled his head back, forcing his eyes on her.

“You want this,” she said. He couldn’t tell if it was a question, and his voice refused to work regardless. He whimpered. She put her foot down on the ground again and then pushed his head in the same direction. The position was more abject: him all but prostrate before her, his elbows parallel with the ground. She pointed her toe to give him more leverage as he licked the leather, trying to work up saliva.

“Pathetic,” she said. The acid in her tone startled him; his gaze flew up to assess her expression, and he was chilled to find that there was no pity in her eyes. “You want vengeance and you can’t even take it. What would your precious warlocks say if they could see you? Whimpering for a chance to lick my boots?”

Something hot kindled in his gut, sending a pulse to his cock. He left her boot to kiss the inside of her calf, alternately licking and kissing his way up her leg, pushing the black lace of her skirt out of his way as he reached her knee, where he bit into the delicate skin there.

She stepped back and cuffed him across the face.

He fell back more out of surprise than the force of the blow, and she knelt to straddle his hips, shoving him onto his back. He stared at her, shocked, terrified, and keenly aware of the pulsing ache of his cock. His face stung where she’d struck him.

“You’d like to fuck me,” she said. “You think that’d be the ultimate revenge, don’t you, seeing me ride you and like it in spite of myself? Just the same, all of you. Acting like the world revolves around that _thing_ between your legs.” She snapped her hips forward. The friction made his cock ache harder. She pushed a finger into his mouth and smirked as he pursed her lips around her second knuckle and sucked. Slowly, he breathed out through his nose. The last thing he wanted to was to give her the satisfaction of hearing him moan. His acute awareness of how badly he was leaking through his trousers was humiliating enough. “So desperate for me... what would any of them think of you?”

He pushed her hand from his mouth. “You’re repeating yourself,” he snapped. She struck him again, and he hissed. She rocked against his growing erection.

“You could get out of this any time you like,” she said. She pulled a handful of his hair and a high whimper left his throat before he could swallow it. “One word from you, and I could be halfway across the clearing. We both know it’s true, and yet here you are, letting me treat you like this.” She was rocking steadily against him now. His pulse hammered like a mouse’s. “Which can only mean,” she continued, “that on some level, you must want it. You wouldn’t think of it otherwise.” A whimper rose in his throat, but he swallowed it before it could escape. His face and ears pulsed with heat. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me how much you want this.”

He whispered the word so quietly it was barely on the edge of hearing. She paused in her rhythm and leaned down. Her hair was a curtain around their faces. “What did you say?”

He pressed his lips together. “Please,” he whispered again. His face flushed at how quickly he had crumbled.

She traced a fingertip down his cheek, and for a moment, he thought he saw pity in her eyes.

Hatred he could take, desire he could take, but never pity. His chin trembled, and he pulled her forward until her weeping cunt was over his mouth, and he could purse his lips around her and be saved from having to think, having to be witnessed in his shame.

Her thighs shook around him. She made no sound but for a series of quiet breaths that drove him mad with their delicacy, their restraint. He pushed a finger inside her, just to see if she’d react, but she only rocked harder against him, her hands tangled in his hair. She was salty-sweet on his tongue. To his starved palate, she might have been a banquet.

Her hips snapped forward with the force of her climax, and she yanked his hair hard enough that he yelped with surprise against her.

Her weight left him suddenly as she lay beside him on the ground. He stared up at the sky, willed himself to fall into it. He could feel her eyes on him. He imagined the picture he must compose: the abused red of his mouth, the glisten of her slick over his mouth, his unshaven chin. The red of his eyes.

“Come here,” she said. The gentleness of her tone felt like a flail against his flesh, but all the fight had gone out of him. Groggily, he sat up and allowed her to pull him into her arms, his back against her chest, his head against her shoulder. “My poor boy,” she murmured. Her breath was hot on the shell of his ear. One hand ran down his chest, over his stomach. His pulse fluttered, and he couldn’t choke back his sob in time.

“Please—” He wasn’t sure what he was begging for. Release couldn’t be the only thing he wanted from her. Their relationship could never be so uncomplicated. Sex would always get mixed up with all the other things he felt for her. “Please.”

She shushed him and nudged his legs apart with her knee. As she carefully undid his trousers, he pushed his face into her neck. Her perfume was heady, musky with a hint of lemon, and he closed his eyes, breathing it in. He felt safe cradled against her. Safe enough to cry.

“Please,” he whispered. She slid her hand into his underwear, and the first brush of her hand against his over-sensitive cock made supernovas burst in front of his eyes.

She pressed a kiss against his temple, chaste, almost motherly.

He burst into tears.

 

He was still weeping when she rose from underneath him and left the circle, ignoring his hoarse pleas that she come back, that he would do everything she told him if she’d just stay a little longer. He watched her disappear among the trees. No backward glance for him.

They’d scuffed the pentagram. Rather, _he_ had scuffed the pentagram. He studied the smears of earth on his trousers and his hands for a minute or two, then rose. The world slid left for a moment as vertigo briefly overtook him, then righted itself.

He looked back at where Cordelia had gone. There was no trace of her, of course.

His subconscious was cruel.

**Author's Note:**

> Drop a comment if you liked it!
> 
> You can find me on tumblr @gentlemanisatramp. Don't be a stranger!


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